


With You

by JenevaJensen



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Come sail away, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Inspired by Game of Thrones, Missing Scene, One Shot, Post - Game of Thrones (TV), Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 19:34:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19069249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenevaJensen/pseuds/JenevaJensen
Summary: Gendry visits Arya before she sets sail...with a gift.





	With You

“More bloody boats,” Gendry thought. “ _Of course_ , there would be more bloody boats.” He hadn’t spoken to Arya at the Kingmaking. She was distant, formal and it hadn’t been the time, surrounded by all those lords. He had wanted to speak to her afterwards, but her mission just then was Jon. He knew enough not to try to get in the way of her mission.

He’d spent these past months fluctuating between hurt at the rejection, anger at himself and, finally, regret for having asked her. After each day of lording alongside a kindly maester at Storms End, he’d find himself staring into the forge fires at night, banging out weapons and tools until he was too tired to stand any longer, and the other smiths had to urge their new lord towards his bed. Amid the flame and clang of the forge, he’d come to understand that he had asked her the wrong question in the wrong way at the wrong time. She had never needed him to be anything other than what he was. He’d disappointed her with the question, and he knew it. But he’d always been a slow learner when it came to people. Not like her. She could dissect a person in a heartbeat--literally and figuratively.

He stowed his pack carefully in the rowboat and clambered aboard. “At least this trip I won’t be rowing for long,” he thought, taking hold of the oars and pushing off, “though I might be swimming if she heaves me off. And if she does, I’ll deserve it.” The little skiff came alongside the proud new vessel at anchor just offshore. He knew it was hers from the wolfen figurehead glistening in the moonlight on the prow. Ser Davos had told him about the venture. “The New King’s sister is headed West of Westeros,” he’d shared over a tavern supper a few days after the Kingmaking, “that boy may not have the use of his legs, but he’ll make certain he sees more of the world for all that.” Gendry’s stomach had flipped and dropped past his toes in that moment and he wondered whether Davos had noticed that he’d taken much less interest in his shrimp pie and much more interest in his ale after that revelation.

Being careful not to scrape the dinghy along the side of the ship, he stowed the oars and grasped the rope ladder that was dangling along the side. “They aren’t keeping strict watch,” he thought as he shouldered his pack again and began to climb. “But then, no one but me would be foolish enough to attempt to sneak up on Arya Stark.”

~

She’d stowed her cabin. She had copies of all the maps of the known world. She had a crew vetted by Ser Davos himself and supplies, she hoped, for a year at sea without needing to make port anywhere. She wasn’t the captain; she knew she had no skill there. But she was master of her own fate at last—until the Many-Faced God came calling. After all she’d seen, that no longer held any threat. If Death came, she knew what to say. And if Death won anyway, there was comfort knowing that wherever she roved, Bran would be aware of her demise. He could tell Jon and Sansa and…whomever else might still care. With an irritable twitch of her shoulders she shrugged that thought away. It was saying goodbye to her siblings and seeing him at the Kingmaking, she supposed. Nostalgia is a beast and home isn’t home anymore. A girl might always be Arya Stark of Winterfell, Hero of the Long Night, Despatcher of the Night King but she would also always be No One of Nowhere and Everywhere. She’d likely be a few other things before she was through too. But she couldn’t have been what he’d asked. As much as it had surprised her in that moment that some of her yearning heart wanted…parts of it. She’d been as gentle as she could in her refusal. She’d tried to alleviate whatever remaining disappointment or anger he might harbor through her studied indifference at the only occasion they’d been in the same place since. That had been as much for her own protection as his. He’d looked…good. Lording seemed to agree with him. There was a new decisiveness about him that she didn’t want to think about too closely because it made her feel like she did when she’d watched him smith as a child, before she’d known to call it desire. She would never forgive herself if she ruined both their lives trying to be someone she couldn’t be. She wouldn’t…Would Not…be a Faceless Lady-Wife and Mother, Stranger to herself. She had adventures massing on the horizon and she would sail out to meet them.

She was considering turning in for the night when there was a quiet but solid knock on her cabin door. “Yes?” she inquired. The door opened, cautiously, and she glanced up from her maps. Tentative but steadfast blue eyes met her own. Her eyebrow quirked. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her sense of self-preservation suddenly on high-alert.

“I heard you were leaving Westeros,” he said, holding the door open carefully, without taking a step over the threshold.

She gestured vaguely around at their surroundings, “And you came to see my ship? Offer some insight based on your own seafaring experience?” Her questioning eyebrow raised itself a little higher. As it rose, so did Gendry’s hopes. Was she…teasing him? Gendry thought he’d best strike firmly with precision, “The last time we spoke, I asked you to be my wife.”

Her eyes pinned him to the doorframe, hard-and-fast, the same way she’d embedded those dragon-glass daggers. He hurried on before she could interrupt and fluster him, “Years ago, you offered to be my family,” he said, “I should have understood the difference, but what did I ever know of either?”

Motionless, except for the rocking of the ship, she continued to stare at him, so he went on, “Family is, whether you want it or no. You’re bound together by the life you’ve shared. I’d never seen it up close until I saw you Starks. Thinking it all over these past months: we were family on the road for so long, holding each other’s secrets and shielding each other from everyone else. I am your family. You will always be my family. When I asked you, _that_ , I asked you to be something you already are.”

Arya felt her Stranger’s mask starting to chafe under the intensity of his gaze. He hadn’t moved any closer but she felt like the air was being slowly sucked out of the cabin.

“I asked you to be with me,” he continued, “With _me_. In _my_ life. A life being handed to me in a gilt cup. A life that I didn’t have a half-wit’s understanding of, but you did. A life I’d never lived in. But I’ve lived in it now, Arya. I couldn’t own myself anything before. I can now. I own myself a smith and a fighter. I might be more. I’m still fashioning myself. But I know that who I am is brightest, strongest Valyrian steel when I’m with you. I asked it the wrong way ‘round, before,” he concluded with a sheepish half-shrug, “I asked you to be with me. Now I’m asking: Arya, please let _me_ be with _you_.”

She sat in silence studying him with that same unnerving intensity she’d worn when she’d asked about his number of bed partners. He didn’t flinch or drop his gaze. He just held hers. And the door. And the overstuffed pack on his back. He wasn’t a talker. The only time he’d ever said this much in one go, with his heart in his eyes, she’d kissed him and refused. There were no hearts in his eyes this time, just sincerity. What if she said no, again?

Slowly, so slowly, he saw her fingers steeple against the desk as she rose slowly out of her seat. She exhaled. Her eyes met his again. She said, “You know who I am. What I want.”

“I do,” he said, nodding as he stepped slowly around the desk and came to a stop in front of her.

“And what I don’t want.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

“I do.” He reached out a tentative hand to grasp her lightly by the upper arm, blue eyes appealing to grey the entire time. “I came here because the way you told me what you didn’t want that last night between us in Winterfell also told me what you did. Unless I’m a complete idiot who has been selling himself a load of dung these past months,” he said, dropping his arm back to his side, “Which is possible.”

The sides of her mouth quirked at that. He took a deep, steadying breath.

“You are an idiot,” she retorted, “But…you aren’t selling yourself dung.” She took a step closer and suddenly he found she’d cupped his face in her hands and was peering up at him imploring, “I don’t want you not to have what you want. You will make a good lord and husband and father. I’m still certain of that. All I said to you that night is true.”

“It may be,” he said in a low voice, letting his fingers rise to trace feather-light circles at her elbows, “But if I’m not with you then I don’t want it. Any of it.”

“I will never want those things.”

“I understand."

“I—”

“Do you want me?” he interrupted. “I know you did that night. Maybe you had for a while. But I still don’t know if that was because we were dying and you wanted to know what it was like, or whether it mattered that it was me.”

A silence of waves, bird calls, and the distant nighttime rumbles of the ship’s crew at work descended as Stranger beheld Smith. “It mattered that it was you,” Arya whispered at last, stripping off the only mask she had left, “It still matters that it’s you.”

~

“Arya—I—” and she was stopping his mouth with her own again, just like that night. Just like both those nights: the desperate one and the disappointed one. They kissed and kissed again and again, until they broke apart gasping. He smelled of iron, new leather, clean sweat and a smoked-nutty scent that was essentially him. His strong hands cradled her face and his fingers threaded themselves into her partially unbound hair as he starred into her eyes with such longing that it made her want to close her own. She didn’t. For hours or seconds, they stood, foreheads touching, breathing each other’s breath; their lips a hairsbreadth apart, noses grazing gently, never breaking eye contact even as their lids became heavy and heavier with want.

At last, Gendry took a deep breath and stepped away. Arya nearly stumbled into the table upon the removal of his strong, steady form and a furious deprivation bloomed from the depths of her being. “I’m fully prepared for you to offer me to the Drowned God for this,” he stated, crouching to retrieve something from the pack he’d abandoned by the door. Standing, he turned back, and somewhat bashfully offered her a beautiful wooden chest made waterproof by a layer of beeswax buffed into a shine across its surface. She looked at the chest, then back at him. Her thoughts were still dazed with desire. “I brought this for you. For us,” he clarified, face alight, “You weren’t expecting me. I didn’t think you’d have brought any.”

Arya took the chest from him. It was heavy. It was wide. It was deep. It looked like it had taken up the top third of his pack. She set it on the desk. Flicking the catch, it yawned open with the mingled scents of mint and dried herbs to reveal layer upon layer upon row upon row of wrapped twists of, “Tea?” she asked, her one brow quirking skyward again.

“We both thought we would die before,” he explained, “neither of us cared about consequences. We didn’t think we’d live to see them. This is a long voyage. And although I still wouldn’t mind—you have to know that I wouldn’t, Arya—I know and accept that you do. So, I thought…maybe…that this might…?”

She gazed into the depths of the box. Judging by the top layer alone she’d guess it held close to 900 doses. They would run out of food and supplies before she ran out of Moon Tea. He understood. He’d come intending to stay. She felt tears forming and quickly but gently closed and latched the lid on the chest. She turned to him, a tender and unexpected delight suffusing her face. “The Drowned God doesn’t get to have you today, milord,” she teased, “Not today.”

**Author's Note:**

> Arya and Gendry have been in my heart since I first read the books, but season 8 really brought all my hopes for them to the surface. This is my first ever attempt at writing fanfic. Please be gentle with me.


End file.
